How many times does a portable charger charge?

This is a variation of common questions buyers normally ask. Your question is a bit ambiguous so I make 2 assumptions below on the basis that by a portable charger you mean a power bank charger you can carry on you and:

1. how many times will a power bank recharge a phone?
2. number of times you can use it to recharge a phone before it stops working.

How long will a portable charger last?

With respect to 1. above, the answer will help you decide what capacity you should buy. By capacity I mean the mAh (milliamp-hour) rating. Portable power banks tend to come in various real capacities from 1500 mAh to 12,000 mAh. These tend to be branded and the brand names can easily be verified online. You’ll also find numerous power banks (about same or slightly larger dimensions of a standard smartphone) that claim to offer unreal capacities of 20,000mah to 100,000 mAh). Capacity should be immediately equivalent to what’s in smartphones and shouldn't require any conversion adaptors whatsoever. These fake power banks tend to look very cheap (but in reality they can be very costly) and you should be very careful with these because they are in fact generally fake. They should be avoided. There are some basic checks you can do to spot fake power banks.

The answer to the question depends on 2 broad factors - (a) the capacity of gadget you want to charge and (b) capacity of your power bank. There are other factors/variables that I’ll ignore but you can have a look at HetoGrow Solar Power Bank Quality Assurance: Power Bank phone Chargers. The answer is therefore obtainable by doing a simple maths of (b) divided by (a). So, assuming the power bank is 10,000 mah and your phone’s battery is 2,500 mah, you have 10000/2500=4; all things being equal. The power bank will recharge your phone 4 times before it's totally depleted. Power banks tend to lose about 15% to 25% power due to heat generated and some other factors. So you'll likely get less than 4 times.

Regarding 2. above, most power banks tend to have optimal lifecycle of 500. See - Will you get battery problems when you cross 500 lifecycles? In summary, when a battery is totally depleted as indicated above, 1 cycle has been used. However, note that the emphasis in on optimal performance. Hence, even after 500 cycles which can take over a year to exhaust, you should be able to continue to enjoy your power bank.

Hope this has been helpful. If you need more info, feel very free to ask but with additional info.

Dave Ebi is a Most Viewed Power Bank Writer on Quora. Join HetoGrow on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram G+ or LinkedIn

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